The Zeratul Issue

General Discussion
1

Let me preface this by clarifying that Zeratul is balanced. I’m not asking for straight nerfs, just a shift in his power distribution.

Zeratul is easily one of the most frustrating heroes to play against. All ya’ll whining about “Overwatch hypermobility,” you’ve been looking the wrong way.

By level 20, Zeratul is *literally* the most mobile hero in the game.
  • Zeratul has 2 teleports baseline, Blink and Vorpal Blade.
  • At level 7, he gets a 3rd teleport no matter what talent he picks – Warp Skirmisher for another charge of VB, Seeker in the Dark for a teleport to the target of Singularity Spike, or Wormhole to basically undo Blink.
  • At level 10, he can pick up Might of the Nerazim, which can be used for an extra untalented cast of Blink, bringing him up to 4.
  • At level 20, Zeratul can pick one of the single most absurd talents in the game: a 20 second-cooldown Rewind. If he picked Seeker in the Dark or Wormhole at level 7, this talent grants 2 additional Blinks to his combo, for a total of 6.
  • 3 of these teleports are conditional, but the other 3 can be freely targeted and are not conditional.

ALL 6 TELEPORTS CAN BE USED BACK TO BACK WITH NO COOLDOWNS IN BETWEEN.

Combine this with the front-loaded and AoE nature of his damage, and Zeratul is extremely hard to deal with directly. He can teleport in, 100-50 most non-Tanks, and then disappear again, all within about 1 second.
THEN HE CAN DO THAT 2 MORE TIMES.
If you don’t have a good Uther or Brightwing on your team, you aren’t catching him unless he screws up. His disengage potential is just too high, and he never really has to commit to a fight like most other heroes.

And yet, despite all this, Zeratul is statistically balanced. What gives?

Well, this is where double-edged nature of Zeratul’s hyper-skirmishy playstyle comes in.

Zeratul excels in harassment and backline bullying at the beginning and ends of teamfights. However, the necessary drawback to this is that he is largely unable to join in on the frontline in actual teamfights. He is too squishy to actually stand with his teammates and duke it out with enemies like other Melee Assassins like the Butcher, Qhira, or Alarak can.

This means that if he doesn’t absolutely shred the enemy team’s backline at the beginning of a fight, his team is effectively fighting a 4v5. He can’t really do too much if the enemy team just steamrolls his own team without him.
As much of an ungodly micro monster as he is, Zeratul just doesn’t have that same level of impact on the rest of the match.

Clearly, this problem seems to cut both ways.

So I'd like to propose some shifts in Zeratul's power and playstyle by increasing his survivability to allow him to commit to fights and reducing his mobility to force him to commit more.

For starters, bump up his base health, as well as his sustain and/or damage mitigation a bit. Maybe shift some talents around to give him access to his sustain earlier or give him a little armor in his kit or early talents, such as after teleporting with Vorpal Blade or Seeker in the Dark.
The whole point of these suggestions is to make him commit to fights, so he has to actually be able to do that.

From here, I think his mobility up through level 7 is fine. 1 Blink and 2 conditional teleports isn’t a serious issue.

Might of the Nerazim is where the issues really begin. Since MotN reduces the damage of SS and Cleave by 50% when used for those abilities, I think using it for Blink should penalize Blink’s range slightly. Reducing its range from 7.15 to about 4.5-5 should be fine.

Twilight Falls is absurd. What is basically Rewind with a 20 second cooldown is ridiculous. At the very least it should increase the cooldown of MotN and/or not reset the cooldown of whichever ability MotN was used for.
Honestly, it would probably be a better idea just to scrap the Rewind effect and replace it with something else, such as removing the damage penalty from MotN ability casts, allowing talents to apply to MotN ability casts, and/or reducing the cooldown of MotN itself.

As one final thought, I'd really love to see Shadow Assault make a return in some form.

Preferably as a level 20 talent that would remove the cooldown of Vorpal Blade for a brief period but prevent Zeratul from casting other abilities until it ends or he cancels it. Kind of like Mal’ganis’ Blind as a Bat talent.

Those are my thoughts. Number tweaks would obviously be needed for any of these changes, but at this point I’m getting really tired of Zeratul never having to actually commit to his engagements, always jumping away the instant things start looking dangerous. Playing whack-a-mole with a mole that has a Warp Blade of his own isn’t very enjoyable. I don’t mind him being more dangerous up-front if he’s actually, you know, up-front.

10 Likes
2

I agree with you friend.

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3

I definitely agree on blink range being penalized with MotN. Other two get penalties, so why not this one? And twilight falls is stupid. It’s not just a rewind, it’s a better one. On a third of the cooldown of actual rewinds too. I think it needs to be changed.

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4

We dont need more heros like that. Jesus, theres plenty.

#keepheroesuniqueffs

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I totally agree with you

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Yea. In SC he is well know for be tanky and with a strong AA that hits harder but is kinda slow. The changes you are suggesting not only will distribute his power in a better way but also will help to create a good fantasy you are playing Zeratul and not instant transmition simulator.

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7

I wouldn’t mind zeratul’s power being shifted as the OP stated but you got to realise.

Being hyper mobile and jumping about everywhere harassing the backline is literally the reason most zeratul players play zeratul.

If blizzard were to rework that aspect of his kits, MANY players would be unhappy.

Also, why should blizzard shift his power from backline harassing to straight up raw survivability? There are a million and 1 assassins that have raw stats and can stand their ground. Zeratul is one of the few backline harassers.

Let the poor guy keep his identity I say, and no more reworks for the sake of reworks

No more reworks that make some people happy like you, and piss a lot of other people off, and the net outcome is barely a net positive since X number of people like it and Y number of people get annoyed. Better to focus on stuff that gives greater value (reworks that the vast majority of people want, or simply just devote the resources to new heroes/content/balance patches)

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8

There were a lot of Chromie players who were unhappy that Chromie was getting a rework to increase her counterability back in 2018, but that doesn’t change the fact that she needed it.
Same with Zeratul now. He needs changes to make him more counterable, regardless of whether current Zeratul players are happy about it or not.

You seem to be misunderstanding.

Zeratul will still be able to harass the backline, and that can still be his main role. He just won’t be able to teleport in and back out 3 times without waiting for cooldowns. He will have to commit to an engagement to actually finish off an enemy hero.

The idea is to make him stronger, but also more counterable. Right now, he can pretty much run around untouched, but his impact on the overall match is limited. I want to increase his impact, but also increase his opponents’ ability to limit that impact.

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9

Staying in while being evasive already are the roles of valeera maiev new samuro and illidan.

The devs themselves intended for motn to reward people with mechanical skills being able to just coming and roll faces in kinda defeat the purpose…

There is no need to change the hero’s basis because people’s feeling and inability to process motn i’d rather they flat nerf him like they always did before and let 30% of the population use the hero properly.

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10

He is already extremely counterable right now.

Zeratul only has a few ways to engage:

  1. Seeker at 7. Easily countered by dodging singularity spike rendering zeratul useless for 12 seconds.
  2. Blinking in, hoping to blink out with wormhole. Easily countered by stunning him in the 1.25 seconds he can’t use wormhole, and shredding him
  3. Blinking in with might of the nerazim, blinking out with your normal blink. No one does this though because it costs your heroic ability to do this.

And that’s it. That’s literally it. That’s all the engage zeratul has got and they’re all counterable unless zeratul blows his heroic to blink in.

In fact, seeker is zeratul’s most common level 7 pick after the heavy wormhole nerf, and dodging seeker completely nullifies zeratul’s ability to be mobile (if zeratul doesn’t blink in with seeker, he doesn’t get to proc warp skirmisher)

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Butcher him then build him back up, easiest solution to fix this pain in the rear.

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At worst we’ll have another neglected hero like nova or chromie who can’t be good because bronze complain the moment the hero is not bad a their level.
At best it will be genji where 10% people who play the hero will still stomp you and you’ll still complain.
At the very worst every hero will be subjective to retarded forum balance.

The third point is the most concerning, balancing around feelings.

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13

You realize shifting his power to survivability and sustain and lowering his mobility just creates the same issue that overpowered Tracer for a long time…

He is in a very solid state right now given his most recent round of nerfs. Unless you are trying to buff him, you are looking at the wrong thing…

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When evn Alarak and Tracer don’t attract half as many smurfs, there’s something OP about Zaratuel in high ranks, either that or all the murfs have this dea lto only play zera

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Tracer is trash. Even the worst players can right click. Alarak is on perma ban statis and if you die you lose all your sadism.

Zera can pick off people out of position, which at low ranks happens more often than not.

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16

I like Zeratul the way he is right now.

That was because of the perma stealth and shields, which he doesn’t have in HotS.

Can we also address that you have to be a super technical tight player when playing Zeratul? One misclick or screw up and you’ll be in a really bad spot. He’s not the hardest hero but he’s not a walk in the park to learn either. Once you get the hang of him he gets easier, as do most heroes, but every engage has to be perfect or you’ll be ineffective or dead. Very high skill cap but also very high reward.

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17

So the hero rewards players good enough and it is ground to not only tone him down (which is fair) but purposefully make a hero severly undertuned to unplayable status to anyone?

The hell is wrong with your brain?

Can you say with a straight face that if tommorow someone asks for all your heroes to get the same treatement you accept such “using with my rear and not any logic” balance?

Devs already did that with kt they nerfed him ultra hard he was gimmick with gathering power pyroblast and arcane power at 20.
The hero was in the 5 worst winrate range for months people actually begged the devs to make him playable.

Then the devs decided to rework him with one of the most ridiculously overpowered rework ever ( for those who knew gravity crush and original sun king fury).
And to this day even in a somewhat balanced state low skill player still can’t deal with his weakest iterations of living bomb and pyroblast ever.

At the same time people complain they can’t carry games and that hard to play playmakers do not exist in this game.

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18

Shadow assault was worse than both Vp and MotN. So I can’t realistically see them bringing it back.

Can’t disagree with that.

Though the changes would pull him close to what Maiev currently is.

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19

Increasing twiligh falls cd is inevitable, not going to exceed 40-45 sec because it would come to a situation where it would be better off keeping the level 10 option and going with something as uninspiring as nexus blade which would dumb down the hero a lot.

But is it really going to do much in the grand scheme? People who understand how motn work will struggle less.

But the people who complain here are not going to have their life changed much.
Are they going to be satisfied even if the build is harder to use but yield comparable results in the end?

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20

I know you don’t agree with this, so let this slide, but my opinion is, that certain hard to play Heroes are fine with low winrates (Medivh, Genji, Hanzo) and imo, Zeratul should be there as well with his difficulty, so imo he should be nerfed and his stats are too good atm.

But, some powershifts, burfs can also be reasonable and maybe that’s the better approach. I don’t know.

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